Research has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of color (BIPOC) communities, and the barriers to vaccine trust and access among these populations. ...Focusing on perceptions of safety, access, and trustworthiness, studies often attach barriers to community-members, and discuss vaccines as if developed from an objective perspective, or “view from nowhere” (Haraway).
We sought to follow Haraway's concept of “situated knowledges,” whereby no one truth exists, and information is understood within its context, to understand the exertions of expertise surrounding vaccines. We focused on perceptions of power among a BIPOC community during a relatively unexamined moment, wherein the status of the pandemic and steps to prevent it were particularly uncertain.
We report the findings of ten focus groups conducted among members of Rhode Island's Latine/Hispanic communities between December 2021 and May 2022. We called this time COVID-19's liminal moment because vaccines were distributed, mandates were lifted, vaccine efficacy was doubted, and new strains spread. We translated, transcribed, and analyzed focus groups using thematic analysis.
Community-member (n = 65) perceptions of control aligned with three key themes: (1) no power is capable of controlling COVID-19, (2) we are the objects of scientific and political powers, and (3) we, as individuals and communities, can control COVID-19 through our decisions and actions.
By centering the perspectives of a minoritized community, we situated the scientific knowledge produced about COVID-19 within the realities of imperfect interventions, uncontrollable situations, and medical power-exertions. We argue that medical knowledge should not be assumed implicitly trustworthy, or even capable, but instead seen as one of many products of human labor within human systems. Trust and trustworthiness must be mutually negotiated between experts, contexts, and communities through communication, empowerment, and justice.
•Latine/Hispanic communities had mixed perceptions of agency during COVID-19•COVID-19's liminal moments exacerbated mistrust and perceived uncontrollability•Medical interventions are not inherently trustworthy, objective, or capable•Minoritized communities should be empowered to decide according to their knowledges•Pandemic plans should not only target uncertainty, but also foster trustworthiness
Abstract Quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a contested concept and has generally been conceptualised by inter‐related indicators such as staff qualifications, educational ...environment, policy or child‐to‐staff ratios. There has been a more limited emphasis on how young children might perceive and experience quality. This empirical paper employs a research‐creation methodology in combination with feminist materialist theory, notably Haraway's String Figuring, to consider how quality manifests in young children's lifeworlds. Data from non‐participant observations in 17 English ECEC settings were collected and analysed by focusing on child‐led activities where agentic and autonomous engagement with objects, matter, resources, space and places were observed. This resulted in the identification of a series of ‘knots’: security, space(s), material objects, autonomy and other children. We present examples of these knots in six vignettes and propose that these are manifestations of young children's experiences of their educational environments. The knots developed from our analysis recognise how quality was manifested where children felt secure by exploring their chosen spaces. This led to children having autonomy over their play, both alone and with other children. We demonstrate how String Figuring can provide an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the complex and nuanced nature of young children's lifeworlds in various ECEC settings, and argue that the identified knots can provide situated and contextual ways to recognise young children's experiences of quality. By doing so it is possible to develop new knowledge that advances theoretical and professional practice conceptualisations of quality.
The Narrative Productions' Methodology emerges from Haraway's epistemological and political concept of "situated knowledges". According to this perspective, all knowledge emerges from semiotic and ...material conditions that give rise to a specific gaze, which diverges from both a gaze "from nowhere" - realism - and a gaze "from everywhere" - relativism. Unlike realist and relativist perspectives, the Narrative Productions' Methodology reintroduces the notion of an "author" localized in a web of relations and speech genres. Furthermore, in the Narrative Productions' Methodology, the alternative to the critique of the representation of others through the research act - typical of traditional research - consists in the possibility of partial connections with those close to the phenomenon under study. Thus, this methodology suggests that the research team connects with these positions over several sessions. This procedure will produce a hybrid text that expresses a certain way of understanding the phenomenon and guarantees the participants' agency over the product. This article will introduce the fundamental principles of this methodology using a study on the events that happened in Barcelona in June 2001 on the occasion of the World Bank summit.
In this commentary on Prof. Ralf Michaels’ 2023 Montesquieu Lecture, I ask what it is that legal scholars invoke when referring to ‘the climate’. Drawing on material semiotics and science and ...technology studies, I argue that it is productive to become attuned to how the climate is in fact a multiple phenomenon which is produced across social, cultural, economic, financial, technological, political, scientific and other domains. Building on this argument, I offer some preliminary reflections on what a turn from ‘the climate’ to multiple climates might mean for developing a critical legal methodology.
The paper delves into the role of academic institutions in urban commoning, which involves the sharing and collaborative management of common resources. It specifically examines the impact of ...Practices of Urban Inclusion, an experimental learning programme, in fostering new forms of collaboration across places and institutions. This programme was co-designed and co-run by a network of four architecture and urban planning schools and three third-sector organisations across four European countries. The paper mobilises the concept of 'threshold spaces' by Stavros Stavrides to discuss if and how urban knowledge and learning can be co-produced and circulated ‘on the threshold’ between academia and civil society. Practices of Urban Inclusion is thus seen as a threshold space that aimed to bring different subjectivities and forms of knowledge into connection by foregrounding experiential knowledge, fostering collaborative learning, and connecting temporalities. The paper reflects on the key characteristics of the programme and highlights some of its commoning outcomes. We suggest that conceptualising knowledge co-production through ideas of commoning and threshold spatiality allows for more nuanced understandings of the dynamics of academia-civil society collaborations.
In this performance autoethnography, the author uses the poetic language, rather than silence, to express the emotional truth associated with their lived experience. Exploring the convergence of ...multiple identities, they use Tweets as prompts to elicit deepest inner experiences, striving to elucidate situated knowledges that emerge from within. This creative-relational-and-performative process of producing an aesthetic text serves as a cathartic outlet, bringing forth the deeply personal, cultural, and political dimensions of being-in-the-world. The methodological consideration accentuates the significance of individual expression and encompasses the truth-seeking and poetical examination of everyday engagement with this (in)visible lifeworld.
Abstract
This article explores police perspectives of sexual harassment on the London Underground. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with the British Transport Police this article demonstrates ...how the police a) use their ‘situated knowledges’ to make sense of the dynamics of the London Underground and seek out offenders within the network, often without a report of harassment; and b) engage with technologies in order to (re)construct incidents of sexual harassment so that they can be investigated. The article argues that the BTP occupy a ‘soft cyborg ontology’, and claims the implications this has on epistemologies and methods of policing as significant. As well as permitting new insights into the procedures of policing sexual harassment on public transport, it contributes a critical perspective to the role of technology in police culture, practice and methods.
Even though it is now established within the field of border studies that bordering experiences vary depending on who you are, a less investigated problem has to do with how differentially ...border-ed/ing realities and knowledges relate, emerge, and matter. Therefore, this paper unpacks, in dialog with feminist sciences studies, what Sarah Green calls "borderness dynamics" as a cosmos-politics, a complicating ecology of situated knowledges on and of border(ing)s. The argument builds on an ethnographic investigation of the processes through which initially "borderless" White European volunteers from pro-refugee initiatives in Paris come to sense and know borders in the city as they encounter other border-ed/ing versions of Paris through their practices. The paper demonstrates how these shifts in volunteers' border sensibilities and knowledges matter ethically and ontologically. The shifts in their (not)knowing/sensing, animated by processes of complication, multiplication, and texturization, contribute to re-shaping what comes to matter as border, as well as to de-re-territorializing the city and its inhabitants as a borderland and as borderlanders. Attending to borderness dynamics enables one to map encounter-induced positionality changes that contribute to "rescaping" at once borders, borderlands, and borderlanders.
This contribution proposes a reflection on the impact of decolonial theories and practices in social pedagogy courses for future professionals in educational and care work (educators, social workers, ...rehabilitation experts and doctors). In these areas, a decolonial conceptual framework questions the dichotomies that inform the asymmetric professional-user/patient relationships, marked by social inequalities and ethical dilemmas. How do decolonial theories and practices help reconfigure imaginaries and rethink professionalisms? In dialogue with Chicano and Caribbean literature (Anzaldua e Moraga, 2002; Glissant 1990, 1998, 2009), with the feminist theories of women of color (Mohanty Talpade, 2003; hooks, 2020, 2023), the article explores the idea of difference from a decolonial perspective, relating it to the issues of partiality of knowledge and oppression. Starting from an autoethnographic research carried out during the courses that I have been teaching since 2015 and from the journals of the students who attended them, the article explores methodologies and processes that favor becoming aware of the process of co-construction of knowledge situated and embodied during their academic education. Inspired by Glissant’s vision of the All-World (1990), a paradigmatic form of all creolization, we will therefore talk about the classroom-world, a meeting place that seeks to ward off the ghost of the universal and the globalized, in favor of a relationship with globality.
